A look at politics, society, culture and anything else on the radar...

Monday, November 22, 2010

Richard Epstein on Barack Obama - his former Chicago Law colleague - and more...

Great mind, great perspectives...

I am proud that I used to be a colleague of this man -often referred to as"one of the most influential legal thinkers of modern times," and arguably without equal when it comes to the field of Law & Economics...

From Reason's website (source of this video): "Epstein splits faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and New York University; he's also a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to Reason. In books such as Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992) to Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003), Epstein pushes his ideas and preconceptions to their limits and takes his readers along for the ride. A die-hard libertarian who believes the state should be limited and individual freedom expanded, he is nonetheless the consummate intellectual who first and foremost demands he offer up ironclad proofs for his characteristically counterintuitive insights into law and social theory. Indeed, Epstein's enduring value may not be any particular legal or policy prescription he's offered over the years but rather his methodology. He believes in robust and unfettered argument and debate as a way of gaining knowledge. If you don't put your ideas out in the arena, you can't be doing your best work, he argues. 'The problem when you keep to yourself is you don't get to hear strong ideas articulated by people who disagree with you,' he says."

In this video, [Epstein discusses] legal challenges to ObamaCare, the effects of stimulus spending and TARP bailouts, and a former University of Chicago adjunct faculty member by the name of Barack Obama, with whom Epstein regularly interacted in the 1990s and early 2000s. 'He passed through Chicago without absorbing much of the internal culture,' says Epstein of the president. 'He's amazingly good at playing intellectual poker. But that's a disadvantage, because if you don't put your ideas out there to be shot down, you're never gonna figure out what kind of revision you want.'"

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